Mai Taji [name at birth Taj Din] was born in 1941 to a Punjabi-speaking family at Daleri town in Amritsar District, Punjab. Their father Muaaz Din was a farmer, and their mother Fazal Bibi was a homemaker. Taji is the youngest of two brothers and four sisters, and grew up at Amritsar before Partition. Sharing their earliest recollections of childhood, Taji says that the agrarian families in their town were engaged in the barter trade where wheat and rice were exchanged amongst them quite often.
The family diet was vegetarian, and brassware was used for cooking and consumption. They used to play the game of Kokla Chapaki with friends in the mohallah from all faiths quite often. The clothing worn at home was plain khaddar, stitched by their mother and sisters at home.
Taji says they must have been six or seven years old when they had to leave their homes at Daleri. “There was an announcement in our area. We were told that anyone who wants to leave for Pakistan should do it now or living conditions could get worse in Amritsar,” They recounts.
Taji says that their family moved to Lahore via the Wagah Park immediately after that announcement. “It was two months before riots broke out in Amritsar and everywhere else,” They says. Taji did not witness any violence and killings himself but recalls hearing stories from elders about what was happening. From Lahore, Taji’s family went to Kana village in Kasur where they settled permanently. Neither Taji nor their siblings obtained any formal schooling, and Taji’s elder brothers became daily wage workers to support the family. Taji’s father died eight years after Partition. After reaching teens, Taji switched to silk wear for attending special occasions like village festivals, melas and weddings.
During the same time, Taji met their first guru. “I found him while buying vegetables at a market near the Kot Lakhpat railway stop. His name was Safdar. He was veterinarian doctor specializing in livestock and cattle, and an army officer. He hired me as his assistant and taught me how to prepare injections for the animals,” Taji says. After spending some years at their clinic, Taji started work at a tandoor where they kneaded dough for rotis, for two decades. They quit the job after developing a form of vision impairment, and have been at their parents’ home in Kasur ever since. They have many followers from the khwaja sira community in Lahore. Taji depends on them for their daily living expenses nowadays. Their mother passed away in the early 1970s. Taji continues to live at their parents’ home in Kani, Kasur, and reverted to male clothing in the late 90s.
Taji believes that the generation today is suffering from a culture of individualized lifestyles. “The isolation and the restlessness we have comes from that culture. We need to bring back the days when it was considered normal for people in one mohallah to get together in one place and share their happiness and sorrows like a joint family system.”
On nostalgia concerning their childhood at Amritsar, they say: “There is nothing compared to memories of one’s birthplace, the home one grows up in, and friends from the mohallah one used to play with. No one wants to be forced out of their houses all of sudden. The pain of losing home is unbearable, especially when we really had no choice in the matter. It makes me very sad to think of our lost childhood, even today.”

Muhammad Saleem was born in Gurdaspur. His father, Sufi Abdul Aziz had a business of construction materials in the city but they lived in a village of Gurdaspur. They were well off in India. His mother’s name was Rehmat Bibi. Mr. Saleem believes that he was 8 to 9 years old when Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place and he was a witness to it. He was in Jallianwala Bagh with his father when the shooting started. Mr. Saleem and his father hid inside stairs near which they were sitting. They stayed there all night. Next day, his elder brother who was in army came to get them.
In Gurdaspur, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lived together but there used to be a lot of conflicts on festivals like Holi. Mr. Saleem also discussed different Hindu festivals and killings of people. His area was called Abdullah Pur as it was a Muslim majority area. Now the name has been changed and Sikhs live in that area as he discovered on his tour to India after Partition. He visited India twice and stayed with the Sikh family in Koocha Pundit, Delhi which had saved their lives during Partition. This Sikh family was a friend of his grandfather and so they helped them reach River Beas safely. They called the father of that family Bapu which was used for all the elders in India.
On his way to Pakistan, Mr. Saleem has seen a lot of bloodshed and looting which is a painful memory. He is still homeless in Pakistan and adores the freedom that Pakistan has for Muslims.

Salima Hashmi [name at birth Salima Sultana] was born on 14th December 1942 to an Anglo-Indian family in Delhi. Her father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was an army officer, poet, political activist, editor of the Pakistan Times, and founding editor of the Daily Amroze. Her mother, Alys Faiz, was a political activist, writer and homemaker.
Narrating the story of her name, Mrs Hashmi says: “The surname is a very Western idea. In our family, we had the tradition of giving a complete name, a first name followed by the second name. My mother liked Rehana, and Sabiha for the first name but my father didn’t approve. He named me after Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, his friend who was a scientist and also an artist. Hence I was named Salima with Sultana as my second name, and my sister was named Moneeza Gul,” she says. Mrs Hashmi dropped her second name, after the expiry of her second passport.
Her father’s family was from Kala Qadar, a village in Sialkot. Her mother’s maternal family was from France, and paternal family is from London, England. Sharing a family lore about her paternal grandfather, Mrs Hashmi says that after a chance encounter with an Afghan trader in Lahore, he rose to prominence from being a peasant of Kala Qadar, to an educated, well-respected and envied treasurer of financial affairs at the Court of the King Shah Abdur Rehman the II, in Kabul, Afghanistan. “There were many controversies and conspiracies cooking up against him. There was an Englishwoman, a doctor, who was in charge of the women of the king’s harem and introducing the small pox vaccine. Rumor has it that she was in love with my grandfather and when she heard about the controversies and conspiracies against him at the harem, she informed him immediately, and he fled to India. Later on, he went on to England to study law at Cambridge. During this time, the Afghan King sent him a proposal to take up ambassadorship of the Afghan government at Queen Victoria’s court in England, which he accepted.
One of the women her grandfather married was a princess of the Hazara tribe. “The novel Vizier’s Daughter by Lillias Hamilton is actually based on the life and character of my grandfather. After completing his studies, he returned to Sialkot and started his law practice. He was a close friend of the poet Muhammad Iqbal,” she says. “My grandmother was the only Punjabi woman my grandfather had married. She hailed from a village in Sialkot, near Kala Qadar. The rest of his wives were Afghans.”
Mrs Hashmi says that her mother’s maternal family had settled in England during the 17th century. Her great grandfather used to own a posh bookshop on Swallow Street near Piccadilly. “The Prince of Wales used to sit there, and buy books from him. After the economic depression of World War I, they moved and settled in East London, where they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. During that time, my mother joined the Communist Party and became involved in the Freedom Movement for India.”
She left London for Amritsar in 1938 where husband of her elder sister M. D. Taseer was posted Principal of the M.A.O. College in Amritsar. “My father was an English teacher at that College,” She says. Mrs Hashmi’s parents were married in 1941.
Before Partition, Mrs Hashmi and her younger sister Moneeza [born in Simla] were raised in Delhi, Rawalpindi, Quetta, Simla, Lahore and Srinagar as a result of their father’s various postings in the army.
Sharing her earliest memories from childhood, Mrs Hashmi says she was two years old when she was with her family in Rawalpindi. “I remember that because I fell and had hurt my head. I was taken into a hospital and given stitches. It was a military hospital. Parents weren’t allowed to stay with the patient but the maids were. My mother asked my paternal aunt to pretend to be a maid, and then she was allowed to tend to me for the night at the hospital. I almost died of blood poisoning because of that injury. In those days, Penicillin was newly invented. My father being in the army had some privileges, so I was given Penicillin and survived.”
Mrs Hashmi’s first spoken language at home is Urdu. “My parents had decided that their child should grow up on one language and that would be Urdu. My mother had learnt Urdu, and she taught me to read and write at our home in Delhi. When my English grandparents visited us in 1947, I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. It was at the age of four and a half years, I started learning my grandparents’ native language. My grandmother was fun. She used to tell us stories, and would act for us. She came fully prepared with puppets and things to entertain the children,” she recounts.
In early 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at a nursery school in Lahore. “I remember my mother telling me it was a Hindu school. Of course I never knew what that meant at the time. I remember going in and playing there. I used to weep copiously every morning when I was sent to school and that continued for most of my life,” she says.
Describing herself as an introvert and quiet person, Mrs Hashmi’s closest friends from childhood were her cousins Mariam, Salma, and Billu [the late Salman Taseer].
At the time of Partition, Mrs Hashmi, her mother, sister, grandparents, maternal aunt and uncle were in Srinagar. “My father, a Lieutenant Colonel in rank, had resigned from the army in February of 1947 and moved to Lahore to set up the Pakistan Times and Amroze newspaper offices. My grandparents had just arrived from London so we had decided to spend the summer in Srinagar. We celebrated Eid there and afterwards, our father sent us a message from Lahore to leave Srinagar immediately as the situation was getting worse,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
They took a bus from Srinagar to Murree. On the way to Murree, Mrs Hashmi says she saw a bus at Thrait that was full of Sikhs who had been massacred. After reaching Murree, her mother organized the women in a procession to stop the rioting and bloodshed. “I remember she sat me down on a donkey and handed me a white flag. I was the leader of the procession waving my white flag. I was scared of the donkey but at the same time felt proud to be leading a rally of women. There was a certain performance to the role and I really enjoyed it,” she says.
After a day or two in Murree, Mrs Hashmi and her family continued on to the Rawalpindi Railway Station on the bus, and took the train to Lahore. They shared the compartment with another English woman, the artist Anna Molka Ahmed [who founded and headed the department of fine arts at Punjab University] with her daughter.
“There were so many people on the roof of the train. They were from Rawalpindi trying to crossover to India. There was mayhem and crowds, and there was no light in the train compartment,” Mrs Hashmi recounts. “We arrived at the Lahore station, which was under curfew at the time. There was a terrible hush in the city. My father had a curfew pass, so we managed to leave the Station and stayed with Begum Shah Nawaz at Lawrence Road for a while and in the meantime my parents started looking for a place to stay,” she says. They found a grand house not too far on Lawrence Road which is now a Government Office Building. Sharing her memories of her mother’s reactions on visiting that house, Mrs Hashmi says: “The lawn was completely dug out. The house was in bad shape, ruined by the miscreants. The electrical sockets had been pulled out, fans were taken off. There was a prayer room in the house that was defaced and badly desecrated. I remember picking up a children’s comic book from the rubble and my mother snatched it from my hand and threw it down yelling at me: we are not to touch anything here,”
Mrs Hashmi and her family settled in an undamaged upper portion of a well-known doctor’s house on Empress Road and began rebuilding their lives. Recalling sights from the damaged lower portion of the house Mrs Hashmi says that she saw a refrigerator slashed by an axe. Her paternal grandmother had migrated to Gujranwala from Gurdaspur barely escaping the violence, and was eventually allotted residential property in Lahore against the lands she owned in Gurdaspur.
In late 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at the Convent of Jesus & Mary where she wasn’t allowed to speak Urdu because everyone at the Convent was encouraged to speak English. “The nuns were aghast that I was an Englishwoman’s daughter but didn’t know any English. They refused to let me speak in Urdu and I used to weep and would sit at the edge of the door waiting for school to end. My grandparents used to pick me up in a tonga. I used to rush at the sight of them, I hated that school so much.” She says. 104/2, U B;pvk Ph 2, Street 3,
At home, Mrs Hashmi says that daal chawal had always been her favorite dish cooked by her mother, and mangoes are the love of her life. “She also used to make Irish stew and Shepherd’s pie that I loved. Her specialty was homemade ice-cream, which she made using an icebox when we didn’t have a refrigerator. My mother was always particular about hygiene. I remember she used potassium permanganate to wash the dishes and the clothes to keep epidemic diseases like cholera and dysentery at bay. She was very particular and strict about table manners. That was her Englishness that used to persevere. We always had napkins on the table.” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
In 1948, she was enrolled at the Queen Mary Convent where she studied for three years then moved on to the Kinnaird High School in Lahore from where she completed her matriculation. Despite her inclination towards the arts, Mrs Hashmi derived inspiration from the sciences, particularly Physics.
In 1951, Mrs Hashmi’s father was incarcerated by the Pakistan government. Recalling an incident of her final year at Queen Mary’s, Mrs Hashmi says that she was invited by one of her school fellows to her birthday party. “I hated going to parties but since I had become reclusive after my father’s arrest and no news on his whereabouts, my mother insisted that I should go. I was eight years old at the time. There were some men sitting on the table at the party who started asking me questions about my father’s whereabouts which turned into a kind of interrogation. I started putting on a bravado act despite not having heard from him in three months. I told them my mother has just received a letter from him. I knew I was doing the wrong thing but I was so scared at the way they were interrogating me I told them what they wanted to hear. My mother found out about the incident. She called my school fellow’s family and gave them hell for it. I still remember the way she yelled on the phone,”
In 1956, she opted to study at the Lahore College for Women for her intermediate degree in fine arts and in 1962, she completed her intermediate certification course on design from the National College of Arts in Lahore. In the same year, she travelled to London and studied for a three-year diploma in art education at the Bath Academy of Art in Bristol majoring in photography and painting. In 1990, she completed her MA honors in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.
In mid-1965 Salima was married to playwright, writer and artist Shoaib Hashmi whom she’d met on several occasions in Lahore and London, due to their overlapping interests in the performance arts. Sharing the tale of her marriage, Mrs Hashmi says. “Our marriage took place after my grandmother’s approval. She had no idea that Shoaib and I already knew each other. She looked at him once and said that he is a nice boy and I should definitely marry him.”
The marriage took place in Karachi were Mrs Hashmi’s parents were living at the time. Mrs Hashmi moved to Model Town in Lahore with her husband after marriage, and lives there today with her immediate family. The couple has one son, Yasser Hashmi and a daughter, Mira Hashmi.
Soon after their marriage the 1965 war had broken out, and Lahore was under curfew once again. “The whole of Gulberg was empty. Most people had run for their lives but we stayed behind. Shoaib used to have a curfew pass. He was doing a program called Parakh, and I was doing a puppet show called Babloo aur Naazi for PTV. During the war, we used to go and do those, and I still enjoy doing that.” she says. “We used to walk around in the darkness with the curfews going on and the noise of sirens. It was a short war but a lot of people died because of it. During this time my father wrote the poem called Blackout.”
In 1966, Mrs Hashmi returned to London where she joined an infant school and invested most of her time on art education for children. In the meantime, her husband took up his studies at the London School of Economics. The couple stayed there for three years. In 1969, Mrs Hashmi took up teaching Fine Arts at the National College of Arts in Lahore whilst continuing to build her team of artists for television shows Mr and Mrs Hashmi were producing together. She also served as the Principal of National College of Arts for four years. She’s organized, curated and implemented several art exhibits and design projects, conferences and seminars in Pakistan and around the world. She also has several publications to her credit.
In 1981, Mrs Hashmi’s husband was arrested and jailed at Kot Lakhpat with 400 people for their progressive views. “It was déjà vu for me at many levels. My daughter was the same age I was when my father had been arrested and the superintendent of the Kot Lakhpat jail where my husband was, was the same jailer during my father’s tenure in prison,” she says.
In 1955, Mrs Hashmi visited her birthplace Delhi with her father during the Asia Writers’ Congress organized by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Her father was the head of the Pakistani delegation. “I remember we went across Wagah on foot and then went on to Amritsar by train where we had lunch. We arrived in Delhi and met with friends from pre-Partition days. I also remember meeting Nehru,” she says.
In 1962, Mrs Hashmi revisited Delhi with her mother to watch celebrations of the India Republic Day. “It used to be celebrated with royalty and pomp, with elephant processions and fairs during Nehru’s time,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.
Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, she says: “There is no closure because people’s stories have yet to be properly documented and understood. They were the ones who had to pay the price for a decision in which so much was left to chance, and neither side envisaged what they were unleashing. It was a terrible carnage which was totally unnecessary. The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the 3rd and 4th generation today who don’t have those immediate memories but they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.
There are a million ways to look at Partition. Over the years I have heard stories of bitterness, of great optimism, of loyalty and of gratitude. As a child, I’ve heard stories from my parents who witnessed it. My mother worked in the refugee camps. I was at the Lahore Railway Station when a train full of dead bodies had arrived and my mother had yelled at our driver to take me away from that carnage. There was a deathly silence on the platform in Lahore which I understood years later.
My father, even though he was from this side, could not reconcile all his life with the biggest bloodbath in the history of this region. It is evident in the fact that he managed to write only one poem on Partition. It’s these stories that lead us to know why it happened the way it happened.
The fact remains that the British set this up to drive the point home. This was their last good bye to the Sub-Continent. It could’ve been nipped in the bud very easily but they chose to look away when they had the means not to. I feel we really have to accept that there was this separation and we need to come to terms with it if we want to move forward. Otherwise, we are only going to trivialize all the carnage that has happened and it will weigh on our shoulders if we don’t find a way to cope with it.

Shahryar Khan was born on 29th March 1934 into the Ruling Family of the Princely State of Bhopal. Mr Khan's father, Sarwar Ali Khan, was the Nawab of Korwai State. His mother, Abida Sultaan, was an Heir Apparent to the State of Bhopal until her migration to Pakistan in 1950. In Bhopal, 90 per cent of the population was Hindu and 10 per cent were Muslims and other faiths. It was considered a haven of peace for people of all faiths and retained its peaceful status during the troublesome times of Partition riots and massacre in India.
Mr Khan's maternal grandfather, the last Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan was an urbane, sporting, and fearless personality. He was the first scion of Bhopal's ruling family to receive a university education, and twice the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes. Of the six hundred princes in India at the time, he was one of the most educated and articulate ones at the upper echelons of the Viceroy's council. "He had very good relations with the Congress Party. He had very good relations with Jinnah," Mr Khan says.
His grandmother, Shahzadi Memoona Sultaan was a direct descendant of Ahmad Shah Abdali, and the Afghan King Shah Shuja. "She had settled with her clan and brought her culture to Bhopal. She would speak in Persian with her clan, and converse in Urdu with us. She was fluent in French. She would play tennis and was adept at playing the piano and the violin. She was a well-accomplished woman."
His mother, was the eldest of three daughters of his grandfather, and for 25 years, Heir Apparent to the State of Bhopal, being the eldest daughter. "She was the favorite of her grandmother. It was she who suggested that my mother be declared the Heir Apparent. The British were a bit cagey on this because my grandmother, was relatively a young woman and they anticipated that she could produce a son. My great grandmother insisted, and the British ultimately bent to her wishes and in 1928, she was declared the Heir Apparent, and remained so until she left Bhopal in 1949 for Pakistan," Mr Khan says.
His mother had two younger sisters, Sajida Sultaan, married to the Nawab of Pataudi, Iftikhar Ali Khan, the famous Indian cricketer, and Rabia Sultaan married to Agha Nadir Mirza from the Bhopal Royal Family. Both of her sisters continued with their lives in India after Partition.
Mr Khan's parents separated a year or two after his birth, and he was raised under the sole supervision of his mother, two English governesses and a governor. "Married life was not my mother's cup of tea. She was a very aggressive and outgoing person. She in fact had said to him to marry another woman. It was an amicable parting, and they remained friends for life. He really didn't have a role in my upbringing or made any decisions about my life. It was my mother who would make all the major decisions."
Mr Khan was raised at the Noor-us-Sabah [Royal Palace in Bhopal] before Partition. Sharing early memories of his upbringing in Bhopal, Mr Khan says that it had about 54 rooms with 200 people living in it from family members to workers and security staff. "We mainly used to dwell in the main living room downstairs. My mother's study room was downstairs where she used to work. Next to it was the room where we were taught. Next to that was the dining room and next to that was a large forward drawing room. All around the house there was a lovely verandah with marbled floors where we used to play cricket." He remembers. Wheat and cotton were grown on the agricultural lands that were tilled by tenant farmers. The harvest was distributed amongst the farmers and sold in the market but never stored, Mr Khan says. Street salesmen were forbidden to roam around the palace compound by the security staff.
The dress code for Bhopal was simplistic for both men and women. "We were strictly instructed from a very early age not to dress gaudily. All of our clothes were mostly made of cotton, and sometimes khadi," he says.
Sharing his thoughts on the foods of Bhopal, Mr Khan recounts Rezala [chicken cooked with white gravy in oil] and Bhata [sweet dish made out of a cow's milk that had just given birth to a calf] to be his favorite delicacies.
The rules of purdah were quite flexible in the State, Mr Khan remembers. "The women of Bhopal were much more advanced intellectually than their sisters elsewhere in India. They were active in sports like hockey, tennis and squash, and some of them were very good chess and bridge players. My mother was an All India Squash Champion," he says.
Mr. Khan's early education started from home. By the age of four, his mother had adopted two boys, Sultan Mal, from a Hindu family, and Syed Farooq Ali, from a Muslim family to accompany in the spiritual and intellectual growth of her only son. In the morning, together they would take lessons in Urdu, Quran and Islamiyat with a Wahhabi scholar, followed by lessons in English, mathematics, geography, history, science, calligraphy and the arts with an English governess. The afternoons and evenings were reserved for sports, learning crafts and musical instruments.
"We had the same tutors, and the same governesses. We were brought up together and went to the same schools until my departure to England," he says. Both Sultan and Farooq became avid hockey and cricket players. Sharing two of his fondest memories from childhood, Mr Khan says that first was when he obtained his very first present, a 410 rifle, and the second was shooting his very first tiger at the age of nine years. "I severely regret it now but at that time it was culture, rite of passage that you became a man if you shot a tiger and you had to be part of that culture. I couldn't do that now."
In January 1945, Mr. Khan was enrolled as boarding student at the Royal Indian Military College in Dehradun. "My mother wanted to toughen me up and decided to send me to a military school." He remembers that the first three years of schooling at Dehradun were a huge influence on him. "You learned to live with people from Bengal, Madras and Punjab and know their customs and ways of life. The Sikh boys in our dormitory, had to get up half an hour earlier than the rest of us, in order to shampoo and wash their hair and tie it all up. We would observe all the Hindu and Sikh festivals at the gurudwara and the temple just as they would observe Ramzan, Eid and Eid-ul-Azha with us. In short, different cultures were living with each other. There wasn't any hatred or anything like that amongst us."
Mr Khan's schooling future at Dehradun became uncertain due to the surge in Partition-related riots across India. "Before that we had no interest in it. We would read highlights of it in the Civil and Military Gazette at school, and skip to the sports page for scores. We weren't very politically active at the time but I was definitely elated at the thought of Muslims having their own country," he remembers. "Then we started hearing news of trains arriving at Bhopal with mutilated bodies since it was one of the main railway junctions in India at the time."
In June 1947, his mother withdrew him from RIMC upon the Principal Mr Prichard's advice. Mr Khan resumed his studies at the Daly College in Indore until the summer of 1948. Sultan, his elder foster brother stayed behind in Dehradun and joined the Indian army, while the younger foster brother Farooq Ali joined Mr Khan at the Daly College in Indore. "During this time, my mother had started mulling on migrating to Pakistan but kept those thoughts to herself, and some of her closest friends," he says.
Sharing the first memory of Partition significant to Mr Khan, he shares: "On 30th of January 1948, we were at school [Daly College], playing cricket and hockey and suddenly the news came that Mahatma Gandhi has been assassinated. This was a huge shock. Everyone was stunned, even people like us who were carefree. Before that there were no tensions between Hindus and Muslims. There were only 12 to 13 Muslim boys in college. They hadn't announced the name of the assassin for six hours. During those six hours, there was always a possibility that a Muslim might have done it. If that had happened, then all hell would have broken loose against any Muslim. My mother got into a station wagon and drove straight hundred miles to Indore to the college. She told the principal B.G. Miller that she's going to take all the Muslim boys and the principal said he couldn't let them go without their parents' permission. To which she replied if something happened to them then he would be responsible for not letting them come with her back to the safety of Bhopal. He eventually allowed her to take us all. We were all packed into the station wagon like sardines and taken off to Bhopal. We drove for four hours and by then it was known that a rightwing Hindu had assassinated Gandhi. In a sense we were relieved but it was a very bad time for us."
In the summer of 1948, Mr Khan's mother decided to migrate and settle in Pakistan after putting her son at a boarding school in England. They set sail for England from Bhopal on the ss Asturius via Bombay and Liverpool.
He was boarded at the Oundle Public School while his mother waited to obtain a visa to Pakistan in England. "It was a bit of wrench because I was quite happy in my life at Bhopal. I'd had a fairly good time studying at Dehradun and Indore but going to England was a cultural shock to me. Studying the subjects was not the problem. The problem was studying with English boys and their culture. For example, to find a quiet spot to say your prayers was not easy because they would make fun of you. Another oddity was that the boys would undress in front of each other in a room full of people, and their hygiene habits were repugnant. On the other hand, I learnt a lot on how different cultures performed as a result of the effects of post-World War crises which drove them to conserve and give up on pleasures. My great bridge to culture was spanned ultimately through sports. I was a good sportsman. In my first year at school at the age of 14 years, I was selected to play cricket for the school and became a hero," he says.
In the meantime, Mr Khan's mother was unable to get the visa to Pakistan after Jinnah's unexpected demise. In 1949, she returned to Bhopal after learning that her father was considering the Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's offer for help in running the country in Jinnah's absence. "He had been given the option to become the Defense Minister or Governor of East Pakistan," Mr Khan says.
In 1950, she returned to England to meet with Mr Khan and was successful in getting a visa to Pakistan on her British Indian passport with timely help of Liaquat Ali Khan whom she'd met at the consulate as a matter of coincidence, he remembers. "After dropping me off at Naples, Italy by road, she took the plane to Karachi via Cairo. In August 1950, she was the first leading lady from the senior Muslim states to have migrated to Pakistan. It's only my mother from our family who had come and sacrificed everything that she had in Bhopal. She had the biggest claim for refugee compensation in Pakistan amounting up to Rs. 84 lacs."
Mr Khan spent four years studying at England, completing his A Levels in 1952. Sharing his thoughts on discussions on Partition in the UK, he says: "There wasn't much discussion on the rights and wrongs of Partition. The feeling in England was that India had become an economic burden on the British people, especially after the war. The sooner that burden was released, the better. The fact that Pakistan was not on the map until 1947, tended to confuse people. They all thought we were Indians, and we would aggressively say I'm a Pakistani, and they'd say: where is that? Later on when Pakistan government became part of the pacts against communist economies, is when it came under the British radar, as an ally. The common person had no interest in it. I was too young to take a position on the horrifying riots in Punjab and Bengal since the only thing I knew was that a lot of unnecessary slaughter took place while people were crossing the borders."
According to the 1950 Registration of Land Claims Act [for Refugees from India] introduced by Ayub Khan, refugees were not allowed compensation of more than Rs. 3 lacs, Mr Khan Shares. "Only the agreed areas of East Punjab and Junagarh were allowed full compensation. The people that my mother knew were getting massive amounts of money and mansions to occupy. No one had favored us."
In August 1951, Mr Khan made his first trip to Pakistan to be with his mother for the summer break.
From her savings, she'd built a house for herself and her son in Malir, Karachi. "She did it without anyone's help. It was poor compensation by Pakistan government to a woman who had sacrificed so much for the sake of Jinnah, for the sake of this country. When one makes these sacrifices, one doesn't look for profits and that is how she was. But, it hurts." In Karachi, they had no electricity and basic electrical appliances for eight years. "We used to sleep out in the open with mosquito nets, in the cool breeze," Mr Khan remembers.
After completing his A Levels from Oundle, Mr Khan went on to Cambridge where he studied Law. He also became fluent in Spanish and French with deep appreciation for their poetry and literature. He graduated in 1956 and returned to Karachi for a longer period. After a brief stint at Burma Shell, Mr Khan took the exam for Central Superior Services and obtained fourth position across Pakistan. In 1957, he joined the Foreign Service and stayed with them until his retirement in 1994.
From 1994 to 1996, he was in Rwanda as special representative to the UN Secretary General overseeing peacekeeping operations. "It was a nightmarish experience, as Rwanda was being subjected to genocide. A million people were killed in three months." Mr Khan has authored a book called the Shallow Graves of Rwanda on his experiences on what Rwanda went through.
In 1999, Mr Khan was appointed the Pakistan ambassador to France and returned to Karachi before completing his two year tenure to look after his ailing mother, who passed away in 2002.
In 2003, Mr Khan moved to Lahore after his first appointment as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board. "I'd temporarily settled in Lahore then, and I really liked it. I bought a house here in 2006, and eventually settled here with my family."
Mr Khan also teaches Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Read more about his life and career in Foreign Services here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahryar_Khan].
He was married to his wife in 1958. He'd met her in England. She was a student at Queens College. "She comes from a distinguished Urdu speaking migrant family from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh and Allahabad." The marriage took place in Karachi. They have three sons and a daughter.
Mr Khan is currently in his second stint as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board and lives with his family in Lahore. He visits his mother's home and resting place in Karachi from time to time. Both of his foster brothers, Sultan and Farooq have passed away. "Whenever I'd go to Bhopal, I'd meet Sultan. He served in the army most of his life and retired as a colonel. He passed away in 2014. I remained friends with Farooq all my life. He went on to become a chartered accountant and died in 2006."
He enjoys visiting places of worship whenever in India or other parts of the world. "Be it the Muslim places of worship in Delhi and Agra, or the mosques and churches in Rome, Paris, England, Tunis, Jordan and Istanbul, I'm more interested in the history of these places of worship than the act of worship itself."
Sharing his final thoughts on Partition, Mr Khan says: "The creation of Pakistan was inevitable but I don't think the division of Punjab and Bengal were inevitable. I believe these divisions were the source of a huge humanitarian disaster, which could have been avoided. In that sense both our Indian and Pakistani leaders let us down. I look back on Partition partly as a dream fulfilled for Muslims and partly as an avoidable horror that followed Partition. I feel the British must be held responsible for the role they played in leaving us with unresolved remains of their glory years: the water works, the railways, states and the boundaries."

Arghwani Begum was born on 2nd January, 1922 at the Princely State of Sahaspur in Uttar Pradesh. Her mother, Ms Ghafoorunisa was a purdah-observing home-maker. Her father, Mr Samiullah Khan was a Governor of the Princely State of Sahaspur with 22 villages in the Bijnor district under his possession and supervision. Residents of the villages were mainly Muslim, Hindu and Christian families and most of them were farmers, she recalls. “Seasonal crops were grown in the villages with mainly rice, sugarcane, pulses and sesame from what I’ve seen. A portion of the harvest would come to my father. That was our family’s main source of income,” she says. The irrigation system for the lands at Sahaspur was well-based. Each village in Sahaspur had its own well.
She grew up with three sisters at their haveli (mansion) in Sahaspur. Arghwami Begum is the youngest. Electricity came to Sahaspur in 1934, when Arghwani Begum was 10 years old. “Before electricity arrived in our area, we used to have oil-powered fans,” she recalls.
Their haveli was segregated into mardana (male) and zanana (female) sections including the living rooms, dining areas and the kitchens, she recalls. “Men and women living in the house were not allowed to trespass into each other’s sections,” she says. The same rules applied to the servants and the maids, she says. There was a separate building for guests within the haveli and stables for the elephants and the horses as well, and a garage for cars. Food used to be made by the cooks. “We used to have both male and female cooks assigned to the dining areas. The men used to eat outside mainly, while the women ate inside,” she recalls. Copper pans and utensils were mainly used for cooking. “On the first or second of every month, they’d be electroplated,” Arghwani Begum’s clothes, shoes and other household amenities mainly came from Delhi and Muradabad. Jewellers from Delhi used to come to Sahaspur to sell gold and diamond necklaces and earrings as well, she says.
Recalling her early childhood days, Arghwani Begum says she was overtly fond of climbing the trees. “I used to get together with my friends and climb the falsa and the morus trees and pluck the fruits.” She recalls having many dolls and playing with her friends. “Sometimes we would marry the dolls and enact a proper Indian wedding in their honour. Our mothers used to stitch the wedding clothes for the dolls,” she recalls. Most of Arghwani Begum’s childhood friends were daughters of farmers from all ethnic and religious backgrounds who used to visit her haveli with their parents quite often, especially during harvest seasons and crops distribution days. “Before I entered my teens, I was officially a boy with no purdah restrictions,” she says.
She learnt to read and write in Urdu at home. “We used wooden boards to write in Urdu. We’d use two types of bamboo pens, the ones with flat nibs was used for writing alphabets and the ones with narrow nibs were used for punctuation marks and dots,” she recounts. Arghwani Begum received her early and advanced religious schooling at home as well. She never went to an academic school of learning. “My father was against it. I grew up on Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s compilation of Islamic teachings in Urdu called the Bahishti Zewar and the novels of Maulana Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi,” she says.
In 1935, Arghwani Begum and her family went on their first annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on ship via Karachi. “I used to run around in the ship a lot. We were at sea for 10 days before reaching Mecca. We completed the pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina, and then went to Jeddah. We stayed there for about three months and returned to Karachi via Jeddah,” she says.
In 1943, she was married into a family from Delhi. “It was a three-month long wedding considering the time-consuming journeys on elephants. The barat stayed at our haveli for seven days,” she recalls.
By 1947, Arghwani Begum, mother of two children, a daughter and a son, was pregnant with her third child. Recalling events leading up to Partition, she said Hindu-Muslim communal tensions had begun to escalate after May 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed. “Before that, there was lot of unity and trust between the Hindus and Muslims. We began to see the effects of the resolution when fighting started to erupt in the villages of Sahaspur,” she says.
She was 25 years old and at Rang Mehal in Delhi when Partition was announced. She was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. “I really didn’t have any clear understanding of what is going on when our boxes were getting packed with valuables and necessities. My family told me that we are moving out of the haveli and nothing else,” she recalls.
They set out from Sahaspar in the family’s motor vehicles with her children, mother-in-law, husband, sister-in-law, uncles and their families for the Purana Qila (Old Fort) of Delhi. “At the Fort, we didn’t have a roof to sit under as there were so many families there and it was raining immensely. One of the families at the camp, in charge of pegging tents saw us and immediately pegged a tent around us. Arghwani Begum spent the night there and the next morning went into labour. She gave birth to her third child, a son, at the Old Fort migrant camp at Delhi, a day after Partition. Arghwani Begum’s sister-in-law had started crying incessantly after holding her new-born nephew “but I didn’t register why”, she recalls. “There were no clothes for the baby. He was draped in one of my daughter’s frocks,” she says.
They stayed at the Old Fort for two days and carried on to the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi in the army jeeps that were expected to pick them up. “At the station, while everyone was worried about having something to eat before the train departed, I wanted to get on the train immediately. I hadn’t eaten for nearly three days but had no hunger for food. I just wanted the journey to end,” she says.
During her journey to Lahore from Delhi that started on the 17th of August, her train made stops at various stations. Recalling a night’s stay at the Amroha Railway Stop, she says lots of people got off the train in desperation to get water and eatables for the journey but never returned. “At some stations that were downhill, we saw people from the hilly areas rushing towards our train with food and drinks for the refugees for the rest of the journey. It was a relief to see that but I still didn’t have the heart to eat or drink anything,” she says. As her train continued to move, Arghwani Begum witnessed the massacre of Sikh passengers in a train passing by theirs in the opposite direction. “There were men climbing and entering that train with swords and knives. I saw the sudden commotion and heard their screams and cries of panic. I also witnessed men jumping off that train with their women and girls. It was horrifying.” she recounts.
Her train finally made it to the Wagah border on the 20th of August but it was not the end of the ordeal as our train had come under attack too. “It was so sudden. We immediately sealed shut the windows of our train with whatever we could get our hands on. My baby almost fainted due to lack of Oxygen in our berth. One of the male helpers in the train helped my baby get some air through the train’s main entrance while the killing spree lasted for an uncertain period. There was a lot of people, especially children from many berths of that train had been killed. I saw their bloodied bodies when we finally got out of the train when the assailants had left,” she says.
From Wagah, Arghwani Begum and her family (mother-in-law, sister-in-law and children) moved to the refugee camp at Walton. They were picked up hours later and shifted to the Davis School which had been temporarily converted into a residence for migrants in poor physical shape. She was reunited with her husband and parents three days later. “They’d discovered our whereabouts through announcements on loud speakers at the railway station,” she recalls. From Davis School, Arghwani Begum’s family moved to her daughter’s future husband’s uncle’s house in Model Town where they stayed for two-three days.
From there, she moved to a small independent house in Model Town’s C-Block, once occupied by the Hindu families. “There was a 10-kanal vacant plot next to that house which used to belong to an affluent Hindu landlord. My husband purchased the plot and we had a big house built on it for my children,” she says.
In the 1950s, her family was allotted some lands at Dera Ismail Khan against their property at Sahashpur by the Pakistani government. “We had no roots or business in Dera Ismail Khan and therefore used those lands for agricultural purposes only,” she says. Her mother-in-law expired in 1971 followed by her husband who died of heart failure in 1975. The couple has two sons and four daughters. Two of her daughters are educated and settled in the US. “My husband had left my sons on a solid footing and taught them all there is to know about leading a responsible life. They practically took care of everything after his demise,” she says.
In 1980, she visited her birthplace in India with two of her daughters Nabahat and Sabahat on train. Her daughter says, “She had practically started shaking and crying as we approached her house. It was very intense for her,”
Arghwani Begum currently lives at her husband’s house with her maid, one of her sons, daughter-in-law, grand-children, and great-grand-children in Lahore nowadays.

Geoffrey Douglas Langlands was born on 21st of October, 1917 to a British family in Hull, Yorkshire in England.
His father worked for an Anglo-American company and his mother was a folk dance instructor at a small school. Mr Langlands was raised with his twin brother John Alexander Langlands. Both the boys were named by their mother.
“Geoffrey and John were my parents’ favorite names. Alexandar Douglas was the name of my maternal grandfather. Since my twin brother was ten minutes older than me, Alexander went to him, and Douglas became my middle name,” he says.
Mr Langlands’ father died as a result of the 1918 flu epidemic that had killed over 20 million people worldwide. After their father’s death, the Langlands moved to their mother’s parents’ home in Bristol where he was raised with his brother by their mother and maternal grandparents. Geoffrey’s mother died of cancer in 1930, and went into the care of their grandfather eventually, who’d passed away a year later. “Our father died when we were one year old. Our mother died when we were twelve, and we lost our grandfather when we turned thirteen. There was a lot of death in our family from a very early age,” he recounts.
In July 1935, Geoffrey completed his A levels, and took up teaching science and mathematics to second grade students at a small school in London the same year. He taught for nearly four years. “In my fourth year, I was promoted to teaching third grade students,” he says.
During this time, news of World War II caught Geoffrey’s attention. “I was preparing to enter the fourth year of teaching and then came September 1939. I was sitting by the radio all by myself when I heard Churchill say that Hitler has taken over Poland, and as of 11am, Britain is at war with Germany,” he recounts. “I never did anything without discussing things with my brother. Once, I saw an advertisement in the English paper asking for persons to join to become engineers in the air force. My brother advised against it since our family had no money whatsoever. He was not around at the time WW II was announced. Without telling anyone I made the decision, and headed straight to the recruitment office to enroll as an ordinary solider,” he recounts.
Mr Langlands joined the British army in 1939, and in 1942, he was recruited as commando and fought against the Germans at the Dieppe beach in France organized by the chief of operations Lord Mountbatten.
In January 1944, Geoffrey joined the British Indian army and was posted at Bangalore where he was made in charge of selecting, recruiting and training young men to become officers in the army. “I was under training at Kent. One day, three British colonels of the Indian army came to the place where we were being trained to become army officers. They wanted volunteers for selecting applicants to the British Indian army. I was the only one with that kind of experience, and was therefore chosen for the job. I was in a unit for interviewing, testing and training the boys applying to be officers in the army. It was an important task and I was engaged in the unit for two years,” he says.
Sharing his experience of the initial years in India, Mr Langlands says the Quit India campaign by the Congress was gaining a lot of momentum and the British soldiers could sense the tensions building up. “To quit India was something impossible, especially when the war was on. We were under strict orders to stay at our posts till the end of the war. There was no question of going anywhere else around the world,” he says.
In early 1947, Mr Langlands and his unit came under the supervision of Lord Mountbatten for the second time, now as the last viceroy of British India. “He was in charge of all of us, and it was evident that he was in a hurry from day one in India as well. We used to call him the whirlwind man,” Geoffrey says. “The first thing he did was give names of volunteers to stay on for one year after the actual independence. I was also selected as one of the volunteers since I’d already been engaged in the task of recruiting and testing potential army offices in India,” he recounts.
“We had to add one short paragraph in a lot of documents stating ‘do you want to join the Pakistan army or the Indian army?’ Mountbatten made the Indian army in charge of the task, and there was a lot of suspicion that he did this to delay whether young ones wanting to join the Pakistan army would have the choice to make the selection,” he recounts. “However, when the lists were finally issued by the Indian army, the young ones had the choice to join Pakistan army,”
After Geoffrey’s recruitment as the volunteer trainer during Partition, he was posted at Dehradun, where he trained potential officers for both the armies up to December 1947,” he says. “In the meantime, in July, I was told that I must travel to Rawalpindi at once by train because I’d been posted to one year in the Pakistan army, and the young men at Dehradun wanting to join the Pakistan army were to arrive at Rawalpindi from where we would take them to the military academy in Kakul for training.”
Geoffrey took a train to Rawalpindi to make arrangements for the young men’s arrival in the city. When he reached Rawalpindi, he found the city deserted and found the army officers’ mess after all day of inquiring. “There was only one cook in the mess, and everyone else had gone off to India I was told. There was no office for the young men from Dehradun to gather at, and no one to receive them there,” he recounts.
At the time of Partition, Mr Langlands describes being on the railway for route back and forth between India and Pakistan for ten days as an officer of the Pakistan army.
His journey began from Rawalpindi to the tribal areas around the Himalayas by train, to make a farewell visit to his infantry there. Upon reaching the Gujrat railway station, the station master requested him to vacate the train for passengers in the train behind them. “The passengers were Indian army troops bound to India. We stayed in the station for an hour, and then moved on. When we got to the Lahore station, it was almost empty. The top man was there with few others but no trains were moving. The train that we had vacated for the Indian troops was waiting at the Lahore railway station. The station manager asked me to guard the train for the night as there was a lot of trouble in Lahore, and I kept guard of it the whole night,” he says.
The next morning, Geoffrey set off from Lahore. He had gotten half way to Amritsar when their train was stopped a small station near a village. “The villagers told us that we can’t go ahead in the train tonight as there was a lot of trouble in Amritsar. We took refuge in a big bus and there were about 20 Indian officers with me. They were talking to each other and saying somebody has to go out and find out from the train guard on what’s happening. None of them seemed clear on whether they should go. I volunteered to check things on their behalf,” he recounts.
Geoffrey met with the train guard who took him to the station master’s office. “We’d walked down the platform and halfway to the station master’s office, some people started firing machine guns at us from nowhere. I shouted at them: Stop fighting! Stop firing!”
“They were used to the English voice and they stopped firing. I went down to the steps and shouted don’t fire until you can see who you’re firing at. When we got to the station master’s office, he was lying down, having been shot dead inside the office. The assistant was sitting at his desk shivering, and asked what was happening. We told him the train is not going to move until daylight comes,”
About mid-day, the next day Geoffrey and the Indian troops managed to get to Amritsar railway station. “The military guarding the trains at the station were in Pakistani army uniforms, getting ready to return to Lahore. The Indian people knowing that I was from the Pakistan army told me that they no longer want the Pakistani military to be here but allowed me to continue my journey to the Himalayas. Recounting the journey, he witnessed people firing at each other indiscriminately and indescribable insanity. “At times, when people would rush towards the train, the men with the machine gun would ask me, “Should I fire at them?” I was an ordinary passenger in the train trying to keep things calm but the question kept coming up throughout the journey,” he says.
Mr Langlands stayed with his infantry in the Himalayas for nearly four days that was quite shocked to hear about what was going on down the hills.
“Gradually all the train crosses were cut off, and I had to spend three-four days there [to regain focus].”
In September 1947, Mr Langlands took the train to New Delhi from Peshawar [express service]. There he was told to coordinate with the unit in charge of sending migrants to Pakistan. Like most migrants to Pakistan, Mr Langlands was required to get clearance from the Pakistan desk of Delhi. They had to clear some payments and I had no problem with that. From Delhi, I took the emergency flight by air to Lahore. You were only allowed 20 pounds of luggage. There were no seats in the plane as everyone was sitting on the floor to accommodate more people,” he recounts.
“The idea of giving any sort of power had no effect on me but the turbulence continued for several months after Partition,” he says.
In December 1947, the young men of the Pakistani army in Dehradun were officially transferred to the Pakistan army. During the same time, most British officers were asked to leave Pakistan by the new government prior to the completion of their yearlong contract with the British government. “Jinnah spoke strongly with the prime minister against letting all the British soldiers leave. He directed him to find out what all the British officers had been doing in the past four months and see which ones are worth keeping. So they agreed,” he says.
From January 1st 1948, a two-year contract was given to those who’d done moderately good work, and those who were really good at what they’ve been doing were given a contract of three years with the Pakistan government. Mr Langlands retired from the army as Major after a decade of training Pakistani army officers. He resumed his career in teaching and joined the Aitchison College for Boys where he taught in Lahore for 25 years. To read more about his life and career in Pakistan, please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Langlands.
Sharing his thoughts on the Fall of Dhaka, Mr Langlands says that from the beginning of training of the boys in military units at Dehradun and Kohat, he had sensed aspiring officers from West Pakistan didn’t like going to East Pakistan at all. Every time I went to East Pakistan, I saw the army officers weren’t doing very well there. After 20 West Pakistanis had applied to become army officers, as mandatory practice, a small group of them was sent to East Pakistan for six weeks twice a year. The first group was sent in December,” he recalls.
East Pakistan [Bengal] had been supplying items to the capital of West Bengal through Calcutta or growing things and sending them to Calcutta for several decades. “Now they had been cut off from that route, and couldn’t go there. They had good growth in all sorts of things and plenty of water but found no support from the government. The capital of East Pakistan had a university that was just about the worse in all of Pakistan and there was so much of poverty. The government was really not interested in investing there. The Bengalis considered themselves a colony still being ruled by Britain, and had fairly strong reasons right from the start to break away as separate from West Pakistan,” Mr Langlands says.
Sharing his final thoughts on Partition, Mr Langlands feels the bloodshed and violence that resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions was due to poor leadership decisions of the last viceroy of British India. “Mountbatten was told to get the final independence by August 1948 but he had it done in August 1947. It was typical of him. Otherwise, millions of lives could’ve been spared. It could’ve been done more peacefully and many wars that followed could’ve been avoided,” he says.
Mr Langlands nowadays lives in Lahore at the Langlands House in Aitchison College. “I was seeing two ladies when I was young and each would ask me whom will I marry and when. I’d tell them not until the war is over.” Mr Langlands is 99 years old today, and he never married.